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October 31, 2015

October Goal Recap

Happy Halloween! Also, awkward... I haven't blogged all month. Like I didn't even do my monthly goals post, which is the one and only thing I've been consistent with all year. BUT I still made goals this month, so now I give you my recap.+ Help with cooking at least once a week. Bryan does the bulk of the cooking. And when I say "bulk" I really mean basically all of it. I just really hate cooking, but he's simply indifferent. But I've wanted to change that. I wanted to do my best to start getting more involved in the kitchen by helping with dinner at least once a week. And that could be anything from preparing the entire meal to assisting with side items to just heating up leftovers. (I'm starting slow, y'all.)

And I'm proud to report that I did, indeed, help with cooking more. I even cooked our spaghetti dinner (basically) all by myself this past week. I really want to continue with this, too. Bryan does a lot for me. The least I could do is cook him dinner.

+ Start shopping! For Christmas, of course! September was supposed to be about preparation so that October could be about getting started. And I have. But not a ton. My friend who has a birthday in November and a graduation in December, I've bought just about everything for her. And I at least know what I'm buying for my family and friends for Christmas (minus a couple people). I just need to go out and actually buy everything. My mom is coming up to Knoxville for Thanksgiving, and I'm hoping to be able to send nearly all of my Christmas gifts for family home with her to save on postage. So by then I should have nearly everything ready to go.

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And one other thing... This wasn't exactly a goal, but it is something the group of friends Bryan and I have up here have been talking about doing for a few weeks, and we finally were able to do it. An escape room!

If you haven't heard about them, escape rooms are a new logic and problem solving-based teamwork game that locks you and a group of your friends in a room, and y'all have to solve riddles and clues to get yourselves out before time is up. (In our case, we had 60 minutes.) We went to Which Way Out and had a blast!

We did the Professor's Challenge and made it out with just 3 minutes and 30 seconds left on the clock! I was a little apprehensive before we went. Bryan and I figured it'd be really lame, and we'd make it out in like 15 minutes. Or it'd be incredibly difficult. Thankfully, it was a real challenge, and as our time was running out, none of us thought we'd figure out our final clue to unlock our door. Thank the Lord we were all able to work together and figure out the last clue that allowed yours truly to get us out of the room!

We went to dinner afterward and agreed that we definitely needed to do more of these escape rooms. There are several more around Knoxville, and hopefully we'll be able to get to one soon. Apparently there's an Alice in Wonderland-inspired one that should be opening soon, which sounds super trippy.

And for the record, we did ask how often groups make it out of the rooms. They aim to have about a third of the groups make it out, and the Professor's Challenge seems to be their harder room based on the percentage of groups who escape. The young guy who took the picture above also said that he'd rank our group in the top 10% for our room based on our clue solving and actually unlocking our final lock. I guess that means we're pretty smart. And I would hope that'd be the case considering 5 of the 7 of us are currently PhD candidates.

If you have an escape game in your area, I totally recommend you get a group together and give one a try. Total blast!